Researcher Profile and Collaboration
Mapping perceptual and organizational dimensions that didn't have coordinates before. AI is the instrument — not the product.
This page is the Activity Specification Protocol (ASP) — a machine-readable research profile that documents what the work produces, how it differs, and what collaboration looks like. A YAML version is at spectralbranding.com/spec.yaml.
What The Work Produces
8-dimensional brand perception measurement. Observer cohort modeling via formal spectral profiles. Demonstrated across 5 brands, cross-model replicated.
50+ papers / 7 validators / 8 dimensions / 5 brands
6-level specification cascade from customer experience contract to sourcing requirements. Businesses designed backward from experience goals using testable specs.
6 specification levels / 1 reference implementation
Biological foundation of the rendering problem. DNA (specification) is rendered into a body (implementation) that produces consciousness (emergence) no specification contains. The specification gap is structural and irreducible — the same pattern underlying SBT, OST, and the Activity Specification Protocol.
Research note complete / academic paper in preparation
Machine-readable YAML companion files for scientific papers. Specifies claims, methodology, acceptance criteria, and falsification conditions. Five verification layers from schema validation to retraction cascade analysis.
v0.1.0 / 20 examples / validator + schema / R13 (Zharnikov 2026t)
A research program is a repository. A paper is a render of that research at a point on its timeline — a frozen snapshot, a communication event. A fork is sharing that render with a journal for confirmation. A publication is a merge.
Compliance gates, attributed reviewer commits, AI traceability by design. Paper Spec specifies what a paper claims; Paper Repo specifies how the research was built.
Partial prototype / validator + schemas / R14 (Zharnikov 2026u) working paper
A creative work is a specification. Every rendering — book, film, game, translation, toy line — is a fork. Git semantics map to IP lifecycle: editions are tags, adaptations are forks, canon changes are pull requests, consistency validation is CI/CD.
Style is a rendering parameter. Actors and translators are rendering functions. The specification gap between canon and rendering is the franchise consistency problem — the same Rendering Problem that appears in brands, organizations, and scientific publishing.
v0.1.0 / Romeo and Juliet demo
SBT (external perception) and OST (internal specification) are two projections of a single system — the business observed from outside and from inside. Neither is complete alone.
How This Differs
| Most AI-era work | This work |
|---|---|
| Build businesses ON AI (chatbots, wrappers, agents) | Build frameworks WITH AI (measurement, specification) |
| Ask "how do I use AI to do X faster?" | Ask "what can I now see that I couldn't see before?" |
| Produce essays, threads, takes about AI | Produce papers, validators, toolkits — coordinate systems |
| Treat AI as a productivity tool | Treat AI as a scientific instrument — microscope, not calculator |
| Chase what AI makes cheaper | Map what becomes MORE valuable as AI accelerates |
| Optimize execution speed | Extend architectural reach — more dimensions, cases, consistency |
Positioning Statements
Aaker drew the anatomy chart. I built the microscope.
Illegibility is a moat. Once you can write the rules down, the moat drains.
From brand management I turned to brand measurement.
Structural Transferability
The same specification architecture has produced working frameworks in four independent domains — three of them outside branding. Each is a render of the same trunk: a canonical specification, a versioned history, and explicit pipelines emitting observer-specific views.
- Research as a forkable repository — every paper a public GitHub repo, Zenodo as the version-snapshot mechanism, a CHANGELOG that records how the thinking moved.
- Franchise as a forkable repository — each franchisee a branch with local commits; the franchisor's structural job is to govern merges back into the main branch.
- Six-tier business ontology — owner intent, business model, business entity, product, process, organisation; each tier a distinct layer of structural commitment with its own observers and failure modes.
- One-source-three-observers website — this very site emits to Search Engines (SEO + Schema.org JSON-LD), Humans (visual identity + progressive disclosure), and AI Agents (llms.txt + structured GitHub markdown) from a single canonical source.
This file is itself a fifth, meta-self-referential instance: one canonical YAML, multiple renderings (machine-readable, JSON-LD, this HTML page, LinkedIn About, X bio, one-pager PDF).
Method
Origin
Meta-coordination across incompatible systems. 2005-2006 manufacturing transformation: coordinating German TPS engineers, Russian plant operations, and transfers of Russian plant equipment to an Indian venture simultaneously. Not translating between languages — interpreting between operating systems. The same pattern now applied intellectually — standing outside branding and organizational theory to map their structure with a new instrument.
AI as Instrument
Working with AI as an architectural instrument — holding consistency across dimensions, case studies, and companion papers that exceed human working memory. AI does not generate the ideas. It lets me hold the architecture while I generate them. 200+ sessions, 50+ papers, 4 open-source toolkits, 20+ HuggingFace datasets.
Intellectual Priors
- The Goal
Systems constraints — brand health has a bottleneck architecture, not a quality average
- Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Information density without information loss — make complex systems legible without simplifying them
- The Beginning of Infinity
Good explanations transfer across domains — the pipeline transferred from financial documents to brand perception unchanged
- The Toyota Way
The standard is a baseline, not a ceiling — separate what must be achieved from how
- TRIZ
Structural contradiction analysis — operational problems are instances of recurring patterns
- Brand Identity Model
Four identity perspectives (Product, Organization, Person, Symbol) that SBT formalizes into eight parametrized dimensions — the relationship is formalization, not replacement, like behavioral economics to classical economics. A 10-property side-by-side comparison of SBT against Aaker, Keller, Kapferer, Brakus, J. Aaker, and Holt is on the research page.
Publications
50+ papers across seven theory layers — from mathematical foundations to empirical validation. Find your fast path by role on the Guide, the coverage boundaries on Coverage, and the open gaps on Open Problems.
All preprints available on Zenodo. ORCID: 0009-0000-6893-9231.
Active Research
- Open-source measurement instruments — civilian and professional tiers
Two-tier instrument model adapted from open-source-plus-services patterns (Linux / Red Hat). Civilian tier: open framework, auto-runnable. Professional tier: calibrated cross-observer reference panel, longitudinal measurement, signed audit. Need: beta partners for cross-LLM-observer invariance testing.
- Activity Specification protocol — personal identity, organisational specs, research outputs
The track-record-is-not-portable thesis: capability is rendered against substrate, not carried in the person. Need: HR-tech / legal-tech / academic-hiring validation cases where collapsed bios produce structurally misleading matches.
- Cross-industry OST deployment validation
Six-tier organisational ontology with acceptance-testing cascade as the missing construct. Need: real-world operational data from any industry beyond the reference implementation (Spectra Coffee).
- AI deployment ceilings under the six-tier ontology
Each tier carries a structural ceiling on what AI can absorb (the Tier-3 legal-personhood floor; Tier-4 brand-substrate authenticity; Tier-5 procedure-vs-spec drift). Need: empirical cases of AI-deployment failures attributable to tier-ceiling violations.
- Knowledge-graph + Markov-walk hybrid for spec-vs-perception structures
Deterministic graph (the spec) plus probabilistic walk (observer-specific traversal) as a unified formalism for the spec-and-perception split. Need: co-author with knowledge-graph or Markov-Logic-Network tooling expertise.
- Spec-based research in the post-AI era — cost-asymmetry theory of meaning and meaningfulness
Theory paper introducing the Operator role and a three-layer log / spine / rendering decomposition of organizational knowledge work. Four propositions (P1–P4); P4 (rendering-equivalence under spine-preservation) establishes that distinct prose renderings of a shared spine convey the same meaning. Published on Zenodo; open-license under CC BY 4.0.
- Same meaning, different prose — spine preservation and rendering equivalence (empirical)
Empirical companion to 2026ao demonstrating P4 via management-theory twin pairs (Eisenhardt & Martin 2000 / Zollo & Winter 2002; Grant 1996 / Liebeskind 1996). Reconstruction score Rec = 4 on each pair above a random-shadow null. Published on Zenodo; open-license under CC BY 4.0.
Collaboration Protocol
What I Respond To
- Structured questions about framework mechanisms
- Empirical validation proposals (I have the theory, you have the data)
- Cross-domain applications (applying SBT/OST to your field)
- Genuine intellectual challenges to the framework's assumptions
What I Do Not Respond To
- Generic "let's connect" messages without specific context
- Requests to "make it simpler" without specifying for whom
- AI hype or AI fear — I work with AI as an instrument, not a topic
Contact
Written over verbal. Specific over vague. Structured over narrative.
Machine-readable version: spectralbranding.com/spec.yaml